Smoky Cogs

All programmers dream of being able to write their own operating system….wait, is it just me?

The actual process of writing an OS is a very tricky and difficult process, as there are no helpers for you like memory managers and that sort of thing. When you write an OS, you have to write EVERYTHING yourself from the disk drivers to the GUI.

Fortunately, there is help at hand. Bone Fide OS Developer is a site that has a large collection of tutorials and papers to help you write an OS.

Go give it a try. Maybe you might be the person who writes the next Windows-killer.

CCS3 has been making a lot of waves over the last several months, and is picking up a lot of support on the internet. It truly simplifies a great deal of things that have historically been major headaches for web developers.

The different browsers still have different implementations until the spec is finalised, but for Firefox, and Webkit based browsers, many of the features are already implemented.

My favourite addition, is the HTML canvas, which I have already used extensively, particularly in my O3D tutorials.

Border radius is another great feature, which does away with the need for cumbersome tables and partial images to create rounded images. All you need now is to add the following style

.roundedcorners {
	border-radius: 5px;
	-moz-border-radius: 5px;
	-webkit-border-radius: 5px;
}

Here is an example:
Testing borders

I also like the drop shadows in text, which allow great effects.

.box-shadow {
	box-shadow: 4px 4px 2px #dddddd;
	-moz-box-shadow: 4px 4px 2px #dddddd;
	-webkit-box-shadow: 4px 4px 2px #dddddd;

	text-shadow: 1px 2px 3px #aaaaaa;

}

Here is an example:


Testing shadows



There are many more great additions too, such as better transparency, multiple background images, and multi-column layouts, which will all make web developers lives much, much easier.

Now to find a way to get people to start using these browsers instead of older non-compliant browsers, but that is a different issue entirely….

Stackoverflow must be doing something right. It is beginning to see its crop of imitators starting to flourish. Shapado is one of these.

In terms of look and feel, it closely copies Stackoverflow, although with enough differences that you not likely to get confused.

The reason the team that put up Shapado put it up, is that they feel that they do not want to work with a non-free platform, which to me sounds a bit odd, since, even though Stackoverflow is not quite open-source, anybody is free to register and use the site. There is very little restriction surrounding that. Although, in their favour, it does make sense if you want a local knowledgebase type system based on this format.

The second reason they state is that they feel that Stackoverflow is restricted, in that it only caters for programming, whereas they have made Shapado cater for pretty much anything.

The biggest problem of all though is not really technology related, but rather more social. Stackoverflow has significant traffic, with thousands of users asking – and answering – thousands of questions.

Shapado has very, very few of both questions and users. Maybe it is because the site is still new, or it might be that nobody cares. Only time will tell…

My Xperia, running Windows Mobile 6.1, came preloaded with Internet Explorer and Opera, and I think that both of those browsers are sub-par on this phone.

Internet Explorer, besides just being a Microsoft product, doesn’t always render pages nicely, and flash is often a problem.

Opera, which was my favourite browser on my previous phone, the Sony Ericsson P990i, does not work half as well on the Xperia as it did on my old phone, and in fact tend to favour Internet Explorer over it.

Both of these browsers have been thrown aside now, however, as I now have a new favourite browser. Skyfire is by far the best phone for mobiles.

For one thing, this blog never rendered correctly on either IE or Opera on my mobile, without using a mobile-friendly theme. Skyfire, on the other hand, shows the blog EXACTLY as it would appear on a normal pc browser, and it is readable too.

Skyfire also offers good flash support, and audio and video streaming to boot, and that is not even mentioning the very apparent speed of rendering.

Skyfire simply outshines the competition on all fronts.

Drawing graphs has become simpler in Javascript, with the dygraphs Javascript Visualization Library.

This library will plot data supplied in CSV format using a line graph, using time as the x axis. This makes it very useful for drawing graphs of things such as temperature variance of a city throughout the year for example, or something like stocks or exchange rates.

Other features of the library include moving averages to flatten out spikes in the graph, as well as error bars.

But, best of all, the library is only a 45kB Javascript file, which must be included in the page, and a few lines of Javascript, and you got yourself a graph.

I have stumbled across an interesting project called Pootle. This is a web-based application that makes the management of PO-based translations very easy, allowing collaboration and versioning control.

The best part of all though is that Pootle is a home-grown, South African project, which just adds one more to the good software projects to come out of deepest darkest Africa. It was created by Translate.org.za.

Pootle 2.0 is out now, and is written using Django, and is looking really good.

You can check out the offical Pootle server at http://pootle.locamotion.org.

This week’s new thing to come out of Google in their never-ending supply of endeavours is the Google Code University.

This site is aimed at Computer Science students and educators and discusses important material usually covered in computer courses. So things like programming algorithms, AJAX, Web security and that sort of thing are covered.

The content on the site is licensed under the Creative Commons license, and therefore is freely usable by the academic world.

The amount of content is still a little light though, but I am sure that this will change, since it is easy for anybody to contribute to the site, and certainly looks like a good site to watch for trying to find resources on those sometimes used, but easily forgotten, topics that academics love so much, but only interest programmers in the real world when they are needed. It is perfect for a bit of a refresher for those of us out in the field.